Science & Tech Quote by Bernie Ebbers

“We have the right assets for a fast-growing digital business” is corporate optimism engineered to sound like inevitability. Ebbers isn’t promising a product or a plan; he’s selling momentum. The phrasing does the classic executive two-step: “right assets” implies due diligence without naming anything measurable, while “fast-growing digital business” borrows the era’s hottest halo terms to make the future feel pre-approved. It’s the linguistic equivalent of pointing at a rising stock chart and calling it strategy.

The intent is investor-calming and valuation-stoking. “Assets” is a deliberately elastic word: it can mean fiber networks, customer contracts, brand equity, or just balance-sheet imagination. It also invites listeners to project their own confidence onto the company. Ebbers, as the face of WorldCom’s expansion binge, was operating in a late-90s/early-2000s telecom culture where scale was treated as proof and “digital” functioned like a magic suffix that converted old-economy infrastructure into new-economy multiples.

The subtext is more revealing: if you have to insist you have the “right assets,” you’re already defending a narrative. It’s a preemptive rebuttal to skepticism about whether a legacy telecom could legitimately claim the internet boom. In hindsight, the line reads like a case study in how corporate language can launder uncertainty into confidence. Ebbers’ WorldCom would become synonymous not with “assets” but with accounting maneuvers that made assets - and growth - appear where they weren’t. The quote works because it’s hard to falsify in the moment and easy to believe when everyone wants the same ending.